Thursday, February 2, 2012

1. There is no Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness. “Pleistocene Africa” covers a lot of time and turf.[i]

2. The Descent of Man is Darwin’s worst book, full of sexist Victorian claptrap. Even William Jennings Bryan knew that.[ii]

3. What 1000 male college students in Texas think about women cannot be extrapolated to the minds of the entire human species. Nor can they be extrapolated to the minds of australopithecines, in spite of the obvious joke.

4. Homology is a Darwinian relationship, the result of common descent; analogy is a literary device, the application of metaphor. Humans have slavery; ants have “slavery”. Humans rape; ducks "rape”. Humans wage war; chimpanzees “wage war”.[iii]

6. Homologous does not mean “the same as”. A sparrow’s wing is homologous to your arm, but it can flap it and fly away and you can’t. A chimp’s foot is adapted for grasping; a human’s foot is adapted for weight-bearing. Their brains are adapted to different functions as well.

7. Whether or not chimpanzees are cultural, they are doing things quite differently than humans are, so you still have to come up with a different descriptor for human behavior: like “euculture” or “accumulated culture”.[v] It’s the same distinction, and we’ve already made it.

8. A non-cultural chimpanzee is a chimpanzee; a non-cultural human is a corpse.

[ii]“Darwin explains that man’s mind became superior to woman’s because, among our brute ancestors, the males fought for the females and thus strengthened their minds. If he had lived until now, he would not have felt it necessary to make so ridiculous an explanation, because woman’s mind is not now believed to be inferior to man’s” (Bryan W. J. 1922. God and evolution. The New York Times, 26 February.).